The Team

Our team consists of in-house staff, collaborators and interns. Some work full-time, some part-time. We also collaborate with volunteers. If you'd like to become a volunteer please fill out the form here.

Head of education and Public Outreach

Lars Lindberg Christensen

Head of ePOD

Lars is a science communication specialist heading ESO-Hubble outreach group in Munich, Germany, where he is responsible for public outreach and education for VLT, La Silla, ALMA, ELT, and ESA's part of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Administration

Susana Almagro Garcia

Media Relations, Press Releases

Richard Hook

Public Information Officer / Image Processing

Richard was originally from England and has an MA in Physics from Oxford. After some time spent at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and in Australia and London, he has spent the last twenty years in the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility at ESO and has mostly worked on Hubble image processing. He was one of the developers of the "drizzling" technique for Hubble images and helped with the preparation of the Hubble Deep Fields and GOODS data. He also has a basement full of telescopes that, alas, rarely get used.

Astronomer

Mariya Lyubenova

Astronomer

Mariya holds a doctorate in astronomy from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet after pursuing 3 years of research at the Headquarters of ESO in Germany. In her work, she observes and uses the motions and chemical properties of stars in galaxies as fossil records to unravel the build-up and evolution of galaxies.

Well before she started her university studies in her home country Bulgaria, she was already an active astronomy club member and editor of an astronomy magazine and a newspaper. After the completion of her PhD in 2009, she worked first as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany and then at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Advanced Projects

Mathias Andre

Web & Advanced Projects Coordinator

Mathias obtained an MSc in Computer Science in England and worked for several years as a Unix system administrator and IT Operations Manager before joining the ESO outreach group to tackle new challenges as Web and Advanced Projects Coordinator.

He is passionate about Science and Technologies, and above all loves learning new things.

Raquel Yumi Shida

Web Content Coordinator

Raquel obtained a professional degree in architecture and urban planning at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, her home country. As an undergraduate student, she also took classes in various fields of science and became an avid amateur astronomer, publishing data and articles on galactic and extragalactic stars. Since then she has worked at the Astronomy Department at the University of São Paulo, at NASA/STScI and at ESA/Hubble, doing both scientific research and astronomy outreach. Today she is responsible for creating visual and textual content and managing several websites for ESO, IAU and ESA/Hubble.

A fraction of her publications in astronomy and science communication can be found on this NASA/ADS link

Luis Calçada

Animations Assistant

He studied Physics/Applied Math (Astronomy) but eventually gave up on the idea of becoming a real scientist. Got his first real job on a science centre in Portugal, where for 6 years he's discovered, developed and matured his skills in visual science communication. At ESO he's part of the latter steps of the chain, in a group which tries to deliver to the public the extraordinary science there developed in the exciting and inspiring manner it deserves. His tools of choice are Maxon's Cinema 4D, Adobe's Photoshop and After Effects and a Wacom Intuos 3. When he has the time, he also likes to do some photography, a sample of which you can see on his Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/muitosabao)

ESO Supernova

Tania Johnston

Supernova Coordinator

Tania grew up in the North-East of Scotland, where her love of astronomy started at an early age, thanks to the wonderful dark skies there. Tania obtained a Masters in Chemistry from Southampton, England, before beginning her career in science communication. She has experience creating and delivering hands-on workshops and talks on a variety of scientific topics, to a wide range of audiences. Tania has developed curriculum related educational material and worked closely with the Physics teaching community in Scotland to support the use of astronomy as a context for teaching science at all levels. In 2012, she received a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Chile to visit some of ESO’s large telescopes, to expand her understanding of these facilities and further enhance her abilities communicating astronomy to the public. You can read about her trip in her blog here http://bigtelescopes.blogspot.de/

Interns

Álvaro Caseiro de Almeida

Outreach Trainee

Álvaro holds an MSc degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in Physical Engineering, both from the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, where he was born. In the last years, he has also been devoting significant time to science education and communication, taking science to schools, to the general public and organizing scientific events of various types.

In 2013 and 2015, respectively, he participated in the foundation of the first Student Chapter of The Optical Society and in the foundation of the first Young Minds Section of the European Physical Society, both in Portugal.

He is also an amateur journalist. Astronomy and science management and communication are his current main interests.

Stephen Molyneux

Intern Science Communication

Stephen first found his love for astronomy when he was bought a small telescope as a child. From then on he was hooked and spent many nights looking at the night sky. During his time in secondary school he became a Physics ambassador. The role involved running the lunchtime physics club and also several events, including two “Physics Olympics”, where local schools came to compete in various physics based challenges set for them. He went on to study a masters in Physics with Astronomy at the University of Nottingham specialising in galaxy clusters. In his final year he completed a module titled “The Politics, Perception and Philosophy of Physics” where he was taught how to write scientific articles in various different styles, including reports, blog posts and newspaper style articles. This lead Stephen to search for a role within science communication.

Calum Turner

Intern Science Communication

Calum studies Astrophysics at The University of Edinburgh, and hopes to pursue a career in Science Communication. He has experience of science journalism, helping to host science festivals and bringing astrophysics to secondary pupils in Edinburgh. He is passionate about exoplanets, astronomy and space exploration, and is currently preparing for a master’s project on the climatic habitability of exoplanets.

He is very happy to join the ESO’s ePOD team as an intern, and will use his experience to further shape his Science Communication skills. When not doing science, he is interested in adventuring, playing terrible jazz piano, street-drumming and rock-climbing.

ePOD Chile

Francisco Rodriguez

Chile Press Officer

Francisco is the Press Officer of ESO in Chile. After graduating from Diego Portales University in 2006, he worked for six years in print media, first for the Chilean magazine Qué Pasa and later for the newspaper La Tercera, one of the most important newspapers in the country. There, he wrote about science, technology, education and health. He also had the opportunity to attend various international conferences for science journalists in South America and the United States where he specialized in issues such as epidemics, new technologies, and environmental problems.

Laura Ventura

Team Leader in Chile

Graduate in Astronomy, Laura has worked in Outreach and Education at world-class astronomical observatories since 2001. She joined ESO in 2006. Since then, she has attended more than 150 visits to Paranal, ALMA and La Silla observatories, developing an extensive experience in supporting media and VIPs at the sites. Laura was recently appointed as Interim Team Leader of ESO education and Public Outreach Department in Chile. Before ESO, she worked for almost four years on the development of educational and outreach contents at the "Director's Cabinet" of the Astrophysics Institute of Canary Islands (IAC), Spain. She studied at the Faculties of Physics of the University of Padua (Italy) and the University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain), from 1994 to 1999. She did a post-graduate research work on stellar populations in dwarf galaxies of the Local Group at the Astrophysics Institute of Canary Islands (IAC), her alma mater.